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Monday, 20 May 2013

On straight, cis folks and Civil Partnerships

A day of debate on Marriage Equality has brought many
things, lots of arseholery, of course – but bright sparks like Gerald Howarth’s
nasty homophobia becoming that rather awesome #aggressivehomosexuals hashtag on
twitter. Well played my siblings, well played indeed :).

But it also brought a huge amount of debate about
straight, cis folks (since there are straight trans people who are currently in
civil partnerships) having access to
civil partnerships and I am rather annoyed. So let’s look at that.

Before I begin this, I feel the need to remind everyone
what a civil partnership is and what it was created for – the history people
like to forget

It was not created as a choice equal to marriage that
allowed you to gain some legal rights while avoiding the kyrarchy/tradition/religion/whatever
connected to marriage. It was not a union that meant something different or
special from marriage. It was not created as a union for people who are
uncomfortable with marriage for whatever reason, want to protest marriage or
object to marriage or change marriage or, indeed, do anything else to marriage,
our culture, our society, our tradition, our religions or any other damn thing
in the entire country or even the world.

Now, it’s possible you can repurpose civil partnerships
to do any or all of the above, but that wasn’t what it was created for, it's not what it is.

Civil partnerships were a turd of homophobia, polished up
all shiny, to be fed to GBLT folks because we were fighting for some legal
recognition and marriage was considered too shiny, too special, too precious to
be sullied by the likes of us. It was a way to concede some of those rights
while still making our lesser status in society clear and overt. It was another
legal entry in the annals of “why nasty GBLT people are beneath the precious
cishets”. It still is.

Don’t ignore that. Don’t forget that history. To do so is
dismissive, privileged and homophobic.

And I say that as someone who is in a civil partnership
and am painfully aware of how civil partnerships are treated.

This is what we are trying to fight now with marriage
equality. We are trying to remove the law that says we are less, our families
are less, our loves, are less, we are less. We are trying to get the highest
authority in the country to stop legitimising homophobia, to stop broadcasting
that we are lesser people with inferior lives, to stop insisting that we are
less due respect and full membership of society. That is marriage equality and
that is what we are fighting. And there is a lot to fight – there
are some very needed amendments for this bill coming up and some more Tory
sabotage to fight against.

But today we spent hours talking about cishet people and
civil partnerships. I don’t know if Maria Miller is right and there will be all
kind of delay for the bill – it’s likely she’s lying she is, after all, a
politician and a Tory so chances are good. But I’m unwilling to take the risk
and, regardless, we still spend hours during a debate on equality for GBLT
people talking about the plight of bloody cishet people

Does everything have to be about you? Seriously? Is it
actually possible to do something without cishet people deciding they absolutely
have to be involved?

Do you want to take the turd that is civil partnerships
and maybe use it to fertilise something better, something different? Great! Do
so! By all means fight to use civil partnerships to create something good; so
long as you remember and respect the history of civil partnerships and what
they represented – AND STILL REPRESENT. Remember, civil partnership isn’t a
special toy we got and you were denied, it’s the scraps off your table you
expected us to settle for. Maybe you can
make more of it than that – I hope you do.

But do it on your own damn time. This law is about achieving
equality and righting an injustice on a marginalised group. It is not about
you, cishet people. But you are deciding to use us, our fight, our struggle to
further your own goal. It doesn’t matter how interesting or worthy or
progressive or excellent that goal is – it’s supremely entitledfor you to jump on us like this for your own
agenda – especially if you risk derailing or delaying our actual struggle for
equality.

I’d like it if we could secure our seat at the table
before we focused on whatever gourmet meal you intend to make from the crusts
and scraps you threw to us.